


Imaginary

by JetpackingPenguin



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Lena Luthor Character Study, of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 21:52:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16606112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JetpackingPenguin/pseuds/JetpackingPenguin
Summary: "Do humans feel like this all the time? It's intense and-and disruptive. How do you get anything done?""My solution: boxes.""Boxes, yes. What variety? Cardboard, wooden, lucite?""Imaginary."





	Imaginary

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't my best work, but something I came up with at two in the morning. Lena's forced heteronormative romance with James is the most annoying thing and she feels like a closeted lesbian. 
> 
> I project her so hard and based this off my own experiences. 
> 
> Let me know what you think!

Lena is eight when she realizes she’s different. Alone at boarding school, with children older than her, she begins to notice the differences. The way the girls talk about boys, the “crushes” they have, that she hears about as she walks to her classes and during mealtimes. Nothing like she ever experienced. She watches Veronica Sinclair from across the hallway. The other girl was mean to her, but Lena wanted her to like her anyway. Veronica laugher with her gang of friends, who glanced back at a nearby boy. She was glad she is different from the other girls and didn’t get crushes.

 

She is twelve when she meets Mercy. Home for the summer, she wants to show Lex her inventions, the ones she spent all year perfecting in her dorm, only to be paralyzed by fear. Then comes Mercy. She’s older, and Lena admires her so much, walking effortlessly in heels, lipstick perfect, unsmudged. Flawless. She spends the summer trailing Mercy and basking in the attention. She learns how to dress and how to act. At the same time, she desperately wants Mercy to like her and wants to spend time with her. She adopts some of Mercy’s cool, detachment. The next time Lex belittles her inventions, she shoves down her hurt. Mercy rewards her with a proud smile and her stomach flips. It was... wrong, feeling like that. She pushes down those feelings, embarrassed for having them, boxing them inside.

 

Lena is sixteen when she gets her first “girl crush.” A freshman at MIT in a physics class, by far the youngest student there, she sits in the back of the class to avoid attention. Then one day,  there she is, one row over. Lena watches her during the lecture. Follows the way her fingers move, twisting her pencil between each digit. Admired the way she brushes back her hair away from her face.

 

After weeks of watching, she gets brave. She finds a way into the same coffee shop on campus. It’s there she sees her kiss a boy. Something twists inside her, and it burns. She leaves upset, without understanding why. The feeling goes into another box, where it sits forgotten.

 

“And who are you exactly?”

 

She turns around and looks—really looks—at the woman in front of her. Her heart skips a beat, a breath, and a pause. Suspended in time. Stacks of boxes inside tilt, off balance.

 

She befriends Kara. She sends her flowers after her article, only in gratitude), rearranges her schedule to spend lunches with her (friends spend time together), and digs through L-Corp documents to help her with an article (friends help). Kara likes her back. Something hopeful swells inside her. Her stacks of boxes begin to fall, crash, and split open. They press against the closet door she's kept them behind in her mind.

 

Her feelings for Kara are not fading with time. She hoped their friendship would be enough, would ease that hunger inside her for closeness, to get closer to Kara, but it didn’t. 

 

And finally the puzzle clicks.

 

She’s gay. She is a lesbian, in love with her best friend.

 

No. No, she is not. She refuses to be. She is Lena Luthor, and she is not a lesbian. She's not hopelessly in love with Kara.

 

The next time James expresses any interest in her, she leaps for it and grasps it with both hands like a lifeline. She isn’t gay. She’s not.

 

If she tells herself it enough times, maybe it will be true.


End file.
